Distance

V talked at me, for the first time in a while. They spoke in kind and reassuring ways that helped me feel heard and appreciated. And like I am not incompetent at the social tasks I undertake.

Sometimes I imagine that I am a master of social engineering, with special skills at peering into other people’s heads from afar. Able to target a feel I think they can relate to – maybe even guess at a cause – without really knowing their life. Able to carefully express an emotion in a way I know they’ll be able to understand, skipping a bunch of intermediate steps. Able to waggle my eyebrows (or to a lesser extent, some UTF-8 tokens) in such a way as to induce a particular response. A set of skills I must choose to use for good because the chaos I wield with them could be so destructive. Has been so destructive. It’s sort of how I imagine living in a heist movie.

And other times I feel like I can’t communicate a single emotion no matter how many methods I try or how carefully I execute them. Like I can’t get people to see me even when I’m not trying to be invisible. Like it’s impossible for me to produce a social outcome even when I think I know what I want and can imagine how it might happen. Like I’m incapable of correctly judging how interactions will go even, or at least of accomplishing them, even though I felt confident about my model of the situation in the abstract. Or at least like I can’t get what I want even if I accomplish all parts my technical social skills say are required. That I must not really want better relationships, or that I must not be technically capable of the social skills required, because otherwise they would be happening.

These two things are both true — to a greater or lesser extent — because the aren’t really opposites. One is about my technical skills and one is about my emotional state. But it’s hard in my mind to see them on different scales. It’s very easy for me to imagine that being good at talking to people is the same as being good at getting support from them. That being good at reading people’s emotions or predicting their reactions or means I should never have trouble obtaining what I want socially, and should be easily satisfied if only I bothered to try hard enough to make it happen.

I need to imagine that it’s possible for me to do everything right and still feel unsatisfied. That in some ways it’s impossible for me to get what I want because the thing my damage taught me to want isn’t actually what I need. That I need much more of some things that I never ask for even though I technically know how, because my trauma tells me that needing those things — or at least letting anyone know I do — is an intolerable burden to others. And that wielding chaos is a superpower I can apply to myself to get what I want without being a narcissistic monster. That I can live in a heist movie that doesn’t require anyone to be hurt.

But it’s not a short trip, from here to there. And I don’t make it easy on myself picking people who like that I don’t expect anything of them. I don’t mean that as an accusation — you’re not doing anything wrong — I’m just saying there’s a reason we’re friends and part of that reason is the way our challenges align. It’s hard for many of you to help me with this topic because you don’t even notice it’s happening, let alone think to tell me to stop. Or if you did think to tell me it would be hard because you’d worry about how to tell me and how I’d react. Also I often wouldn’t believe you even if you did tell me.

All of which is to say I need to work on figuring out what I want out of relationships, and then, you know, actually making that happen. To practice feeling like doing so isn’t abusive. To recognize that my superpowers are not just a burden and a danger but also source of great good. To genuinely feel like emotional support isn’t a zero-sum game and that I can create it by the processes that consume it. These are things I (usually) know, but rarely things I reliably feel, particularly when I need to feel them about myself.

Went to the moCa (https://www.mocacleveland.org) on Friday. Watched a video about a project to form a K-Pop group that played both sides of the male/female binary that industry so strongly promotes. And about the focus on beauty in South Korea — the prevalence of cosmetic surgery and importance of makeup/etc. in the culture, and the gendered and non-gendered impacts on broader society. Saw an installation with video content about agricultural productivity, human intervention in breeding, and the way people choose to value those things. Their main gallery was a series of enormous watercolor & acrylic pieces about the Great Lakes and human influences on them over the past 40k years.

Spent most of the day on Saturday arguing with Shanda about when you wanted me to come home. You felt like it was a burden on you for me to go back for only a week. You wanted couple more weeks to herself, and felt like the disruptions to her and the expense of extra travel were a bad idea. I’d also rather do less travel — flying across the country every week or so is expensive and draining — but it’s important to M that I leave before school starts. And important that my wife feels like we can live together.

Shanda’s reaction to almost any “hard feeling”, as you say, is to push me away. You imagine it makes you safe; that more space between is is what you needs to feel better. It doesn’t matter how much space there is already – me being on the other side of the country for weeks doesn’t have any impact — you just know that you needs “more”. I know it’s not really about me. I know it’s her labeling her anxiety with my name and trying to push it away. That it’s not really about the space between us or her not wanting me, it’s just her reaction to her own anxiety. But that doesn’t make it hurt any less. It doesn’t make me feel any safer about having a place to live. This dynamic isn’t new and in many cases I’ve got defenses about it. But it’s sure hard to take when people at both my homes are asking me to not bother them for a couple of weeks while they work on their own lives. To be around later when they need me but to be invisible for a while in the mean time so they don’t have to think about me as much. It’s the sort of thing that makes me wonder how long it is until the next train to Canada*, or how I’m going to fund a third household. And it sure pushes my abandonment buttons.

Eventually you came around to the idea that asking me to disappear probably wasn’t what you actually wanted. That you could get what you wanted while I was around. Maybe even could have my help with it. That you wanted to build a life where you could have the parts you liked of me being away without me actually being away. But even that didn’t quite get us to recovery. We were still at a place where I was your anxiety and my pain an indication that you was right to hurt me. Where avoidance was still the only way you could be happy again and I was nothing but a reminder of everything you wanted to avoid.

It wasn’t until bedtime that you was actually willing to see my pain. To peel your anxiety away from me and see that I am a real human under there, patiently absorbing all your attacks while you insists that not feeling your feelings is the solution to all life’s problems. I’m grateful to get there, but it doesn’t really solve the problem. The threat that no matter how light my touch, no matter how carefully I protect you from me, you is only one trigger from asking me to leave entirely.

It is useful to see in this extreme, to help me understand that there really is no version that is “enough”. That I can’t possible make this better by pulling back. That even leaving won’t make it sufficiently safe for you. In much the same way that having M tell me about the distance between us made it easier for me to see how there’s no version of “enough” sharing that makes people feel like they actually know me, or like our lives overlap in ways that aren’t about me pointing out their challenges. But still it hurts. And I’m sort of ashamed of it – to let myself get into such an extreme situation. If one of you told me about this I’d label it abuse and encourage you to make a dramatic change.

I do need a dramatic change. It does need to get better. I am not only going to expect better treatment but ensure that I get it. But I should also realize that it isn’t about me living with you, that it’s not more extreme than any other time you push away, because the circumstances literally don’t have any impact on your reaction. You would have the same reaction to the idea that me being in the same piece of furniture as the same time zone, and so I don’t need to let my own abandonment by triggered, even if it is what you tells me.

I hope that’s what I ought to be doing, and not just an excuse to keep doing the same broken thing that has hurt me so many times before.

Went to Dante (http://dantetremont.com/our-menu/) for supper last night, for the 7-course tasting menu. It’s a thing Shanda and I both like to indulge in when we travel together. It’s far too expensive, but it’s not something we do often, and it’s a great to spend a couple of hours having a bite of many different delicious things. And a different wine to go with each. Invited M and Eggsy; Eggsy was too sick to come but M got dressed up and sat with us. Shanda and I got to wear matching earrings and both did eyeliner — her for the first time in a long while — and I wore my new argyle suspenders. I haven’t thought about coordinating my style with an event (or a person) for a very long time and it was nice to have some options for doing so, even if it’s still mostly jeans and a polo. There were a lot of individual issues between me displaying style and where I was a few months ago, and a good number that still nag me, but it’s been great just to get started even if it’s still a work in progress. It’s a thing I never would have done without help from M and V, and I’m so grateful for your help.

ZiB

*Once a day at 5:50 AM, transfer in Buffalo, NY. It’s a 13 hour trip from here, but that’s actually faster than from Seattle right now because the whole run is canceled until they clear a landslide and repair the tracks.